Open Source Photography Toolkit

Introduction

Since retiring, I’ve switched to entirely running open source software. For photography, AdobePhotoshop and Lightroom dominate the scene. Most articles and books are based on these products. The Adobe products have a reputation for being very good, but they are quite expensive, especially since they have switched to a subscription model of pricing. In this article I’m going to talk about the excellent open source programs that work very well in this space.

Basically there are two streams here, the quicker and easier software equivalent to Adobe Lightroom and then the more technical and sophisticated software equivalent to Adobe Photoshop.

I run all these programs on Ubuntu Linux, however they all have versions for the Mac and Windows.

You can download the source code for any open source program and have a look at how the programs work. If you find a bug, you can report it, or if you are a programmer you can fix it. Figuring out enough of a program to work on it is a large undertaking, but I feel comforted that that avenue is open to me if I need it.

digiKam

digiKam is an open source photo management program similar to Adobe’s Lightroom. It is easier to use than a full photo editing tool like GIMP or Adobe Photoshop, and has tools to automate the processing of the large number of photos taken in a typical shoot. It has the ability to import all the photos from raw format for further processing, it has a pretty good image editor built in and then lots of tools for managing your photos, like putting them in albums, assigning keywords, and editing the meta-data. There is an extensive search tool, so you can find your photos again if you forgot where you put them. There are tools to publish your photos to various photography websites as well as various social media websites.

Unlike Lightroom, there aren’t nearly as many books or tutorials on the product. I only see one book on Amazon. However the web based manual for digiKam is pretty good and I find it more than enough. It does peter out near the end, but most of the things that are TBD are also easy to figure out (mostly missing the specifics of various integrations with third party web sites).

Another difference is that digiKam does actually edit your pictures and doesn’t just store differences like LR does, so you need to be aware of that in your management workflows.

Lightroom costs $9.99/month and is subscription based. digiKam is free. One benefit is you don’t have to worry about having your photos held hostage if you get tired of paying month after month. Especially if you are an infrequent user.

GIMP

GIMP is very powerful photo-editing software. It is an open source equivalent of Adobe Photoshop. I recently saw a presentation by an author of a book on Photoshop on his workflow for editing photos with Photoshop. I was able to go home and perform the exact same workflows in GIMP without any problems. These involved a lot of use of layers and masks, both of which are well supported in GIMP.

Both Photoshop and GIMP are criticised for being hard to use, but they are the real power tools for photo editing and are both well worth the learning curve to become proficient. There are actually quite a few good books on GIMP as well as many YouTube tutorials on the basic editing tasks.

For 90% of your needs, you can probably use digiKam or Lightroom. But for the really difficult editing jobs you need a tool like this.

RawTherapee

GIMP doesn’t have the ability built in to read raw image files. There are plug-ins hat you can install, but I’ve not gotten good results with these, often they work stand-alone, but not from within GIMP. digiKam can process raw files, and doing that en-mass is one of its main features.

Sometimes you want a lot of control of the process when you do this processing. This is where RawTherapee comes in. It is a very sophisticated conversion program. It supports batch processing and has very sophisticated color processing.

Often in the open source world, components are broken out separately rather than bundled into one giant program. This provides more flexibility to mix and match software and allows the development teams to concentrate on what they are really good at.

Typically you would take all your pictures in your camera’s raw mode, convert these to a lossless file format like TIFF and then do your photo editing in GIMP. This is the harder, but more powerful route as opposed to using digiKam for the entire workflow.

OpenShot

OpenShot is actually movie editing software. I included it here, because many photographers like to create slideshows of their work, where the images have nice transitions and change from image to image with the music. OpenShot is an ideal open source program for doing this. If you have a Mac, then you can use iMovie for this, but if you don’t have a Mac or what something that works on any computer then OpenShot is a good choice.

Summary

There are good open source pieces of software that are very competitive with the expense commercial software products. Adobe has a near monopoly in the commercial space and tries to squeeze every dime it can out of you. It’s nice that there is a complete suite of alternatives. I only use open source software for my photography, and have find it to easily fill all my needs.

This article only talks about four pieces of software. There are actually many more specialized applications out there that you can easily find by googling. Chances are if you look below the ads in your Google search results, you will find some good free open source software that will do the job for you.